Oslo, the play

I watched the play Oslo at Harold Pinter and give it a 3/5 rating.

May be the expectations from all the Tony awards and the publicity set it up to fail for me. The female lead of Mona Juul played by Lydia Leonard was bland with a very "calming" voice and an "earnest" face that get annoying very quickly. The male lead was just about average. The play itself was far too long. Abu Ala of Palestine played by Peter Polycarpou and Uri of Israel played by Philip Arditti stand out, performed by a Greek-Cypriot and a Turkish-Jewish respectively. Nabil Elhouahabi played perfectly the hot-blooded Communist, Hassan.

It was indeed historic that I should watch the play based on the Oslo peace process laying the foundation between Israel and Palestine on the day after Trump decides to move the US Embassy of Israel to Jerusalem.

The story was a bit drawn out and sometimes at the cost of losing focus. For example when Abu Ala and Uri really connect at a human level, they show us the Norwegian couple watching over them with some sort of altruistic view. But Abu Ala was wonderfully portrayed to showcase the clash between patriotism and the economic cost of it.

The most striking sentence comes from the hot-blooded Hassan shouting at the Israelites: you can either be the bully or the victim; you can't be both.
It's true, yet we are all guilty of it. When we bully someone we find a reason to justify it - a reason that makes us the victim.